The first fall auction of the season at Christie’s on Monday was solid, if low energy. There were several empty seats, and some bids had to be coaxed out from the room.

But the bidding briefly jolted to life on Vincent van Gogh’s vibrant 1889 landscape, “Laboureur dans un champ,” which jumped on one bid from $42 million to $55 million.

The painting eventually sold for $81.3 million with fees, just shy of setting a new auction high, not counting inflation, for the artist; the previous top price was $82.5 million in 1990, the zenith of the Impressionist art boom.

The Van Gogh, which depicts the view from the window of the artist’s room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de- Provence, was among the highlights of Monday’s Impressionist and modern sale, which totaled $479.3 million, the highest total in that category for the auction house in a decade. Of the 68 lots offered, 60 — or 88 percent — sold.

“It was a very good sale,” said Paul Gray of the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago. “There was thin bidding, but they succeeded in just about everything.”

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Fernand Léger’s 1913 canvas from his “Contraste de formes” (Contrasts of forms) series.CreditChristie's

Among the other highly anticipated lots of the evening was Fernand Léger’s 1913 canvas from his “Contraste de formes” (Contrasts of forms) series, one of some 50 Cubist canvases produced by Léger in 1912-1914, which the MoMA website describes as “among the most defiantly abstract works yet seen.” Ambitiously valued at $65 million the painting sold Monday for $70.1 million with fees, a high for the artist.

The previous auction high for Léger was $39.2 million in 2008 for another abstract painted in that period, according to Artnet. Jessica Fertig, Christie’s head of sale for Impressionist and Modern Art, said that one reason for the aggressive estimate was that the work had recently hung in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Although the pace of the sale often felt sluggish, bidding noticeably picked up for a few lots, like Picasso’s 1954 canvas “Femme accroupie (Jacqueline),” which sold for $37 million with fees over the high estimate of $30 million and for a smaller 1949 version René Magritte’s famous “L’empire des lumières” oil on canvas, which sold for $20.1 million, just over the high estimate of $18 million.

While much-exhibited, the Van Gogh work had not been seen at auction since 1970; it was one of 13 works from the estate of the Fort Worth collectors Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass. After attracting three bidders, the painting eventually sold for well in excess of its $50 million estimate to a client represented on the telephone by Rebecca Wei, the president of Christie’s Asia.

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